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...oh, right, nontheological implications too. Forgot about those. :o

In the long run, probably. In the short run, not necessarily. al-Andalus (and the Maghreb in general) shifted to Malikism from a madhab they brought with them during the invasion, mostly because the Malikis took the right political stance in the drama surrounding the Abbasid coup. I've no idea...

I'm still trying to work out the family trees and make sure nobody's marrying close kin by accident. And butterflying away the entire world. :( 12th-century Spain was a busy place.

I can't cite sources, but I remember that there was a distinct Shinto revival at some point in the early modern past (I think the Ashikaga shogunate, but I could be wrong.) Prior to that point, IIRC, it had syncretized to the point that it was classed as a sect of Buddhism. I'm not sure what...

Actually, the prototype was smokeless; the problem wasn't the mechanism so much as the magazine (which was huge, didn't feed reliably and held two seconds of ammunition.) Well, that and nothing on Earth needing that kind of RoF in 1899. Setting up a phone to broadcast and receive on radio...

To go to the root, have a different Mongol conquest such that Rostov doesn't get sacked. The Dolgoruky capital stays where it is, and Moscow's only important as a trade city. On the same note, St. Petersburg is awesomely contingent. It's not too hard to imagine it as a swampy extension of...

Condensing things down a bit... The Usual Suspects: More often than not, the following states get the following treatment: Usually wanked: The CSA, surviving Western Empires. Usually at least as well as IOTL: Brazil, Muscovy, Prussia, England, Japan (whose wanks don't usually start until...

Pope Julian II was the one who decided to tear down St. Peter's Basilica and build the current, much larger one. It ran immensely over budget, and the Church decided to make up the difference with indulgences. Something was going to happen to the Church in the 1500s, but a Julian II-less church...

The Stirling engine was developed back in 1816; pursuing that would've been interesting, to say the least. The problem with steampunk isn't design, it's distribution. Before a certain point, it's designing ahead of its manufacturing base; past a certain point, it takes a commitment to...

Waiting For Chinese Democracy: East of, say, the Danube, and south of Italy, nobody develops a republican government until after 1900. (This is the one that bothers me the most. I'd love to see more Cossack confederations, or a Kaga-wank where the ikko-ikki become the major player in the...

Conveniently, because the Tokugawa had a good idea what guns could do and no interest in letting more of them knock around the shogunate. As soon as individual Japanese started realizing that they couldn't ignore their neighbors, they started developing in some earnest.

I wouldn't call it badass, but the sallet is a timeless design. With only minor cosmetic changes, you could claim it was worn anywhere between, say, Actium... ...and the fall of Berlin... ...and only military historians would bat an eye.

Huh... the more you know. As far as offbeat dynasties go, the Palaiologoi married a bunch of daughters off to Mongols in the 13th century. No idea how you'd arrange them, or what they'd be called, but there has to be some potential there. (The name "Uzbek I Porphyrogennetos" keeps popping into...

Not in the foreseeable future, I'll agree; but this is AH, where the past isn't what it used to be. The question is how to make it plausible. The Japanese dynasty has married Fujiwaras for God knows how long because that was the smart thing to do: none of their neighbors had a political...

A Yellowstone eruption should do the trick. The question is how much deader you want the world to be.

On the first point: the Nashimoto were and are emperors of nothing. I don't remember what their official rank and title was (or if they had one), but their sole purpose (like the other eleven collateral lines) was to breed and look pretty in case the main line somehow lost all its male members...

House of Nashimoto-Kalakaua. The queen of Hawaii marries the only son of the Imperial Household's first collateral branch, coming under the Japanese aegis while remaining officially sovereign and autonomous. If the Emperor dies without siblings or male issue, the Chrysanthemum Throne could pass...

It's just barely in the "Before 1900" class, I think (or maybe just barely after), but... Around the turn of the century, Hiram Maxim was working on an improvement to the Maxim gun: a lever that would walk the gun across a preset arc of fire. That version was the one that Kaiser Wilhelm II...

The fall of Baghdad basically ended Arabic philosophy and cemented the transfer of the Muslim world to the ulama and Sufis. So saving the libraries of Baghdad might leave it less dead, which could lead to enormous changes in the history of the Muslim world a few centuries later.

Seconding this, oh so very much. The main weakness of consulopapism is the way religion-state politics correlate; even the Italian states had problems with Rome's internal drama (as expressed by the Roman Inquisition, if memory serves), and most of that was dissent within a common and universal...